Tarquin

Of Cheapside

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Running footsteps—light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery cloth

brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark
blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches,
following a stone's throw behind.
Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then darts into a blind
labyrinth of alleys and becomes only an intermittent scuffle ahead somewhere
in the enfolding darkness. In go Flowing Boots, with short swords lurching
and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse God and the black lanes of
London.
Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through a hedgerow. Flowing
Boots leap the gate and crackles through the hedgerow—and there, startlingly,
is the watch ahead—two murderous pikemen of ferocious cast of mouth
acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.
But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall panting at the feet of the
watch, clutching a purse; neither do the pursuers raise a hue and cry. Soft
Shoes goes by in a rush of swift air. The watch curse and hesitate, glance after
the fugitive, and then spread their pikes grimly across the road and wait for
Flowing Boots. Darkness, like a great hand, cuts off the even flow the moon.
The hand moves off the moon whose pale caress finds again the eaves and
lintels, and the watch, wounded and tumbled in the dust. Up the street one of
Flowing Boots leaves a black trail of spots until he binds himself, clumsily as
he runs, with fine lace caught from his throat.
It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to
be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover,
the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of
London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road
in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural
ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.
Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers, always in
and out of the moon in a perpetual queen's move over a checker-board of
glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his leather jerkin now and half
blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to scanning his ground desperately on
both sides. As a result he suddenly slowed short, and retracing his steps a bit
scooted up an alley so dark that it seemed that here sun and moon had been in
eclipse since the last glacier slipped roaring over the earth. Two hundred yards
down he stopped and crammed himself into a niche in the wall where he
huddled and panted silently, a grotesque god without bulk or outline in the
gloom.
Flowing Boots, two pairs, drew near, came up, went by, halted twenty yards
beyond him, and spoke in deep-lunged, scanty whispers:
"I was attune to that scuffle; it stopped."
"Within twenty paces."
"He's hid."
"Stay together now and we'll cut him up."
The voice faded into a low crunch of a boot, nor did Soft Shoes wait to hear
more—he sprang in three leaps across the alley, where he bounded up, flapped
for a moment on the top of the wall like a huge bird, and disappeared, gulped
down by the hungry night at a mouthful.

II

"He read at wine, he read in bed,

He read aloud, had he the breath,
His every thought was with the dead,
And so he read himself to death."
Any visitor to the old James the First graveyard near Peat's Hill may spell out
this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan,
on the tomb of Wessel Caster.
This death of his, says the antiquary, occurred when he was thirty-seven, but
as this story is concerned with the night of a certain chase through darkness,
we find him still alive, still reading. His eyes were somewhat dim, his stomach
somewhat obvious-he was a mis-built man and indolent—oh, Heavens! But an
era is an era, and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of
England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in
Cheapside published its Magnum Folium (or magazine)—of its new blank
verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it
"got away from those reactionary miracle plays," and the English Bible had
run through seven "very large" printings in, as many months.
So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea) was now a reader of all
on which he could lay his hands—he read manuscripts In holy friendship; he
dined rotten poets; he loitered about the shops where the Magna Folia were
printed, and he listened tolerantly while the young playwrights wrangled and
bickered among them-selves, and behind each other's backs made bitter and
malicious charges of plagiarism or anything else they could think of.
To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though inordinately versed,
contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire. "The Faerie
Queene" by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the tremulous candle-light.
He had ploughed through a canto; he was beginning another:

THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY

It falls me here to write of Chastity. The fayrest vertue, far above the rest….
A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open of the thin door, and a
man thrust himself into the room, a man without a jerkin, panting, sobbing, on
the verge of collapse.
"Wessel," words choked him, "stick me away somewhere, love of Our
Lady!"
Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted the door in some concern.
"I'm pursued," cried out Soft Shoes. "I vow there's two short-witted blades
trying to make me into mincemeat and near succeeding. They saw me hop the
back wall!"
"It would need," said Wessel, looking at him curiously, "several battalions
armed with blunderbusses, and two or three Armadas, to keep you reasonably
secure from the revenges of the world."
Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing gasps were giving way to
quick, precise breathing; his hunted air had faded to a faintly perturbed irony.
"I feel little surprise," continued Wessel.
"They were two such dreary apes."
"Making a total of three."
"Only two unless you stick me away. Man, man, come alive, they'll be on the
stairs in a spark's age."
Wessel took a dismantled pike-staff from the corner, and raising it to the high
ceiling, dislodged a rough trap-door opening into a garret above.
"There's no ladder."
He moved a bench under the trap, upon which Soft Shoes mounted, crouched,
hesitated, crouched again, and then leaped amazingly upward. He caught at the
edge of the aperture and swung back and forth, for a moment, shifting his
hold; finally doubled up and disappeared into the darkness above. There was a
scurry, a migration of rats, as the trap-door was replaced;… silence.
Wessel returned to his reading-table, opened to the Legend of
Britomartis or of Chastity—and waited. Almost a minute later there
was a scramble on the stairs and an intolerable hammering at the door.
Wessel sighed and, picking up his candle, rose.
"Who's there?"
"Open the door!"
"Who's there?"
An aching blow frightened the frail wood, splintered it around the edge.
Wessel opened it a scarce three inches, and held the candle high. His was to
play the timorous, the super-respectable citizen, disgracefully disturbed.
"One small hour of the night for rest. Is that too much to ask from every
brawler and—"
"Quiet, gossip! Have you seen a perspiring fellow?"
The shadows of two gallants fell in immense wavering outlines over the
narrow stairs; by the light Wessel scrutinized them closely. Gentlemen, they
were, hastily but richly dressed—one of them wounded severely in the hand,
both radiating a sort of furious horror. Waving aside Wessel's ready
miscomprehension, they pushed by him into the room and with their swords
went through the business of poking carefully into all suspected dark spots in
the room, further extending their search to Wessel's bedchamber.
"Is he hid here?" demanded the wounded man fiercely.
"Is who here?"
"Any man but you."
"Only two others that I know of."
For a second Wessel feared that he had been too damned funny, for the
gallants made as though to prick him through.
"I heard a man on the stairs," he said hastily, "full five minutes ago, it was. He
most certainly failed to come up."
He went on to explain his absorption in "The Faerie Queene" but, for the
moment at least, his visitors, like the great saints, were anaesthetic to culture.
"What's been done?" inquired Wessel.
"Violence!" said the man with the wounded hand. Wessel noticed that his eyes
were quite wild. "My own sister. Oh, Christ in heaven, give us this man!"
Wessel winced.
"Who is the man?"
"God's word! We know not even that. What's that trap up there?" he added
suddenly.
"It's nailed down. It's not been used for years." He thought of the pole in the
corner and quailed in his belly, but the utter despair of the two men dulled
their astuteness.
"It would take a ladder for any one not a tumbler," said the wounded man
listlessly.
His companion broke into hysterical laughter.
"A tumbler. Oh, a tumbler. Oh—"
Wessel stared at them in wonder.
"That appeals to my most tragic humor," cried the man, "that no one—oh, no
one—could get up there but a tumbler."
The gallant with the wounded hand snapped his good fingers impatiently.
"We must go next door—and then on—"
Helplessly they went as two walking under a dark and storm-swept sky.
Wessel closed and bolted the door and stood a moment by it, frowning in pity.
A low-breathed "Ha!" made him look up. Soft Shoes had already raised the
trap and was looking down into the room, his rather elfish face squeezed into a
grimace, half of distaste, half of sardonic amusement.
"They take off their heads with their helmets," he remarked in a whisper, "but
as for you and me, Wessel, we are two cunning men."
"Now you be cursed," cried Wessel vehemently. "I knew you for a dog, but
when I hear even the half of a tale like this, I know you for such a dirty cur
that I am minded to club your skull."
Soft Shoes stared at him, blinking.
"At all events," he replied finally, "I find dignity impossible in this position."
With this he let his body through the trap, hung for an instant, and dropped the
seven feet to the floor.
"There was a rat considered my ear with the air of a gourmet," he continued,
dusting his hands on his breeches. "I told him in the rat's peculiar idiom that I
was deadly poison, so he took himself off."
"Let's hear of this night's lechery!" insisted Wessel angrily.
Soft Shoes touched his thumb to his nose and wiggled the fingers derisively at
Wessel.
"Street gamin!" muttered Wessel.
"Have you any paper?" demanded Soft Shoes irrelevantly, and then rudely
added, "or can you write?"
"Why should I give you paper?"
"You wanted to hear of the night's entertainment. So you shall, an you give me
pen, ink, a sheaf of paper, and a room to myself."
Wessel hesitated.
"Get out!" he said finally.
"As you will. Yet you have missed a most intriguing story."
Wessel wavered—he was soft as taffy, that man—gave in. Soft Shoes went
into the adjoining room with the begrudged writing materials and precisely
closed the door. Wessel grunted and returned to "The Faerie Queene"; so
silence came once more upon the house.

III


Three o'clock went into four. The room paled, the dark outside was shot
through with damp and chill, and Wessel, cupping his brain in his hands, bent
low over his table, tracing through the pattern of knights and fairies and the
harrowing distresses of many girls. There were dragons chortling along the
narrow street outside; when the sleepy armorer's boy began his work at half-
past five the heavy clink and clank of plate and linked mail swelled to the echo
of a marching cavalcade.
A fog shut down at the first flare of dawn, and the room was grayish yellow at
six when Wessel tiptoed to his cupboard bedchamber and pulled open the door.
His guest turned on him a face pale as parchment in which two distraught eyes
burned like great red letters. He had drawn a chair close to Wessel's prie-
dieu which he was using as a desk; and on it was an amazing stack of closely
written pages. With a long sigh Wessel withdrew and returned to his siren,
calling himself fool for not claiming his bed here at dawn.
The dump of boots outside, the croaking of old beldames from attic to attic,
the dull murmur of morning, unnerved him, and, dozing, he slumped in his
chair, his brain, overladen with sound and color, working intolerably over the
imagery that stacked it. In this restless dream of his he was one of a thousand
groaning bodies crushed near the sun, a helpless bridge for the strong-eyed
Apollo. The dream tore at him, scraped along his mind like a ragged knife.
When a hot hand touched his shoulder, he awoke with what was nearly a
scream to find the fog thick in the room and his guest, a gray ghost of misty
stuff, beside him with a pile of paper in his hand.
"It should be a most intriguing tale, I believe, though it requires some going
over. May I ask you to lock it away, and in God's name let me sleep?"
He waited for no answer, but thrust the pile at Wessel, and literally poured
himself like stuff from a suddenly inverted bottle upon a couch in the corner,
slept, with his breathing regular, but his brow wrinkled in a curious and
somewhat uncanny manner.
Wessel yawned sleepily and, glancing at the scrawled, uncertain first page, he
began reading aloud very softly:
_The Rape of Lucrece
"From the besieged Ardea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathing Tarquin leaves the Roman host—"_




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